Missing Air Malaysia Plane

[LOTUSMAN33]

I am with the shot down theory, I suspect the pilot or pilots are told to fly towards open water in the event of possible terrorism allowing the plane to be shot down. People with out doubt know a lot more than is currently filtering through. I will be very surprised if the black box is ever recovered in such deep water and bad weather fronts. R.I.P to all the poor victims and hopefully the families will someday find peace over such a tragic event.

Hopefully the hijacking theory is somehow wrong though as in this day and age after 911 it should never happen.

Dave

[redshift]

Looking at the data from Inmarsat on the exchanges between the aircraft and the satellite, just like internet pings, it seems to have flown on until probable fuel exhaustion. They know it was MH370 from the MAC address in the pings and from the relative doppler shift in the signals they can make a reasonable deduction of the routing. The final incomplete ping exchange was possibly triggered by generators going offline/resetting when one of the engines flamed out.

I reckon they are looking in the right place but I doubt if they will find anything.

[ramjet]

If it was shot down, wouldn't you have a pretty large sort of debris field?

 

The news here tonight was back on the pilot along the lines of marriage breakup, really depressed etc etc.

 

What is the point though, of taking everyone with you?

 

Something I didn't realise too, is that the black boxes record only the last 2 hours of time, so the time in the cockpit when the transponder was turned off etc is not recorded. Or well it was but then it is recorded over. This came from some senior Aussie crash investigator.

 

I would have thought in this day and age with solid state memory that we have now, that they would be able to record the entire flight?

 

And why aren't planes fitted with say an auto-deploying EPIRB or something like that?

[redshift]

EPIRBs are marine devices and usually designed for capsize or sinking event. There would be little left after a 700 kph impact into water. The aero equivalent are ELTs and these are designed to be impact triggered but the impact triggers are not reliable and they could also suffer antenna failure on impact too.

Probably the simplest answer is to integrate a GPS unit into the satcom terminal with battery back up and arrange for all system pings to add position data? You could also add one of the audio channels that feed the CVR too.

It wouldn't need to be active all the time but ATC could switch it on in the event of loss of ADS-B, ACARS or VHF comms, departure from flight plan or cleared altitude etc.

[Kimbers]

From all reports they are 75% that it was a suicidal or "not right minded" pilot. Possibly the Co-Pilot from the last "Goodnight" message.

 

I'd bow to Sparky's knowledge here, but if he waited for the Pilot to take a loo break/rest break and then locked the cockpit door, could anyone get back in?

 

Could he have depressurised the cabin to stop anyone trying to get at him?

 

It all sounds truly terrifying if they were aware what was happening, but I suspect not because there were no telephone calls/messages.

[Bibs]

You can't make a phone call or send a text from 40,000 feet and to be fair it's unlikely the passengers had any idea what was going on... 

[Kimbers]

They did on the plane that the passengers fought back on 9/11 non? the "lets rock" message to his wife? Or was that lower?

[Advantage]

If out of range of a mast, most phones will store an unsent message in their outbox until they find a signal suitable to transmit it. So the phones on the 9/11 planes will have locked onto a mast as they got closer to the city. I'm not sure what the coverage is like over the Indian Ocean, even at seal level.

 

Missile strike. Definitely. The initial hit wasn't sufficient to cause a mid-air explosive disintegration, but just enough to knock out key elements of flight controls and electronic equipment.

 

Or possibly not.

[auRouge]

Both of those theories are unfortunately possible and have happened in our lifetimes...

Unfit pilot theory:-

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SilkAir_Flight_185

Missile attack:-

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007

Statistically pilot error IS the biggest cause of crashes.. In aviation we go on refresher courses yearly to remind ourselves about the dangers of becoming too extreme in any direction.

The worst crash in aviation history was due to a very senior Captain being too "Authoritarian" and not listening to everyone around him who we're trying to tell him he was wrong...

The opposite extreme of not taking command of a situation is just as deadly!

Not so much of an issue these days in Europe/US as were trained not to become to self important etc etc (there are still exceptions!) but certain Airlines in other continents still have more of a problem with hierarchy and an air of old school "it's my ship sonny" mentality... This as we know can kill :-(

Still impossible to speculate too much but wouldn't be surprised if it was a serious technical issue misshandled with confusion, lack of correct command skills and other variables/distractions thrown in... Smoke, noise, fatigue and weather to mention a few.

I really hope this incident now mandates the use of more sophisticated GPS based tracking tag on aircraft.. In the event of failure everything electrical must be able to be disconnected due to fire risks.. But surely there's something out there which is safe! It will cost money for sure but is it acceptable these days to leave all those families suffering in the dark?

[Stirling_Villeneuve]

If it was shot down, wouldn't you have a pretty large sort of debris field?

 

 

 Starting to report lots of potential debris....

 

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/26/mh370-search-set-to-be-hampered-by-more-storms-live-updates

[Bibs]

[Advantage]

I switched my phone into aeroplane mode the other day.

 

Buggered if I can find it now.

[comem47]

Nothing would surprise me about Sarah Palin (since she can see Russia literally from her house) but at least this one isn't hers:

 

http://www.ijreview.com/2014/03/123782-gotcha-twitterverse-falls-sarah-palin-parody-malaysian-flight-370/

[Guest surferphil]

When asked last week where I thought the plane was I said: at the bottom of the Ocean. Nothing out there but water no one to 'shoot you down' and why would they murder everyone on board? Plane went missing now they found the bits, a really sad situation.

[rogerch]

Shot down makes no sense, you'd have to know where it was first. If it really is in the southern Indian Ocean why would wait/anticipate flight MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean, when it should have been heading, some hours earlier, to Beijing.

[ramjet]

My son just came in and told me that on one of the morning shows you get on tv, that floating debris had been picked up and was confirmed as NOT being from the plane.

 

He then said that the people that got text messages saying that there is probably no survivors, have now been told that based on this, there is a chance that there may be survivors from the flight.

 

Would it not make sense to say 'Everything is being done, but until we find concrete evidence, we can't be sure of anything'?

 

Is this possibly the worst handled event in recent history? I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but there just seems to be more to this than meets the eye.

Also, the guys that have done more math on the satellite pings say it was now travelling faster than first thought. Didn't someone say, somewhere through this, that RR get data sent directly to them on engine performance? Wouldn't that have been already known?

 

I would like to think that this will change aviation and put systems in planes that will not be able to be overridden by the pilots.

 

To the commercial pilots on here, what is the purpose of the pilot being able to disable the transponder or other associated systems in flight?

[Bibs]

Fire.

[ramjet]

Yep.

 

Don't know why I didn't think of that

[Bibs]

Its pretty much the worse thing that can happen, since its often preventable.

[Cos]

Anyhow. Wanna hear my theory on flight MH370?

The copilot did it! 27 year old single guy,

It was the first time he was left in the cockpit alone in a boeing 777 since he started training on that type of aircraft. He locked the captain out of the cockpit. Probably when the captain popped out to go to the toilet. Turned off acars, transponder, CVR, etc and threatened to dive the plane if they attempted to get in. Since 2001, cockpit doors have locks and are bulletproof. They also have CCTV to view the area outside the door. Flew about for some hours and then dived it into the Indian Ocean at supersonic speed. He probably did lots of weird stuff with the plane before doing that. Maybe thought about flying back to KL and into Petronas towers (or maybe someone's house, ex girlfriend etc). He'd probably thought of doing it many times before he finally did it. A bit like those police chase videos when someone gets into a digger and goes through a town smashing things up!

I think he was some kind of an attention seeking psychopathic nutter. Came from a connected wealthy family etc.

Anyhow, if that is the case, we will probably never know the truth, unless someone in the back of the plane wrote something down on paper or electronically and it's found.

I know it sounds a bit surreal, but it's very very possible. I hope I'm wrong, but it really is one of the most possible theories I can think of.

The officials have only said that the captain (pilot) was not suspect. They haven't said much about the copilot.

Very very sad

[titus20]

This is very sad, brings grief to the family of the victims. May we overcome this tragedy......

[Bibs]

Cos, would the pilot not be able to access the cockpit with the code? Could the co-pilot have changed it 'on the fly'?

[ramjet]

I think someone on the tv here said the door can be locked from the inside and the code disabled so that even an authorised person can't get back in

Why has no-one seemed to touch on the topic of after going 'silent' and then changing course, that no military plane was sent up to find it and shadow it to try and find out what was going on?

[Sparky]

If someone conscious is on the FD then you ain't getting in.  There is an emergency process for gaining entry in the event of pilot incapacitation, but if the guy in there is capable of hitting 'Deny', then it's game over.

The smart thing to do - as it seems to have occurred here - is to go off the grid at handover.  One ATC hands you over to another, you switch off the transponder, ATC can't see you. ATC1 forgets you, ATC2 never receives you.  It's not a closed loop - they don't know what to expect in their space; they're dependent on being called or seeing a transponder ping.  After that, it's all down to the military.  And it appears it was their day off.

[Cos]

Hi

Yes. Someone wanting to get in can punch the secret code number on the keypad. That give a warning to the pilots inside that someone is attempting an emergency entry. A warning will sound for a set period of time 20-30 seconds, and then after that the door unlocks.

Of course, during the wait, the pilots can override the entry. And they can also see who is trying to enter with the CCTV.

I'm sure it was the pilots. I am just wondering, if it was the captain, perhaps he was planing to do a kamikaze raid on the BIOT USAF base Diego Garcia.

I AM VERY SURPRISED THE YANKS DIDNT PICK THEM UP ON RADAR

If they did, well, who knows what could have happened!